It was a week when my ex-spouse was out of town. I was on a mission. I went through every file I could find in the house and made copies of statements, receipts, account documentation, everything I could find. Even though I didn’t actually file for divorce until almost a year later, sorting through the paper mound I heaped…

Dating after 60 has a particular flavor of nervousness that 25-year-olds simply don’t have to deal with. You’re not just wondering if someone likes you back – you’re wondering if you still remember how to do this at all, and whether your judgment, tested by a marriage or relationship that didn’t work out, can be trusted again…

Somewhere around 60, a strange thing happens: the world stops asking what you’re going to be when you grow up, and quietly assumes you’ve already decided. Nobody checks in anymore. Nobody hands you a manual for this stretch the way they handed you baby books and parenting blogs for the first one…

If setting a boundary with your adult child feels harder now than it did decades ago, you’re not imagining it. Boundaries at this stage of life come with a particular weight that they didn’t carry when your children were young. Logic might suggest boundaries get easier as you get older – more confidence, more life experience, less need for others’ approval. In practice, many women find the opposite…

By the time we reach our 60s, most of us have quietly rewritten a lot of our life’s plans – careers that took different turns, health that doesn’t cooperate the way it used to, friendships that faded. Family is often the last picture we’re still holding onto exactly as we first imagined it.

If you’re over 60 and finding yourself grieving a relationship with your adult child that technically hasn’t ended – no fight, no falling out, just… distance – you are far from alone, and there’s a reason this particular grief is so disorienting. Most griefs we’re taught to recognize have a clear beginning: a death, a diagnosis, a divorce papers signed. This one doesn’t…

Somewhere around my late 50s, I noticed a pattern in nearly every woman I knew, including myself: we were remarkably good at giving other people permission to live boldly, and remarkably bad at extending that same permission to ourselves. We’d tell our friends, “Go ahead and take that trip, you’ve earned it.” We’d tell our daughters…

By the time most of us reach our 60s, we’ve gotten very good at letting go of things we’re told to let go of. We’ve let go of unrealistic expectations about our adult children’s choices. We’ve let go of relationships that no longer serve us. We’ve let go of the exhausting belief that we have to hold every family crisis together with our own two hands…

I want to ask you something that might be a little uncomfortable. When did you last ask yourself what you actually want? Not what your children need. Not what your grandchildren would enjoy. Not what would make the holidays easier or the family gathering run more smoothly or the situation with your adult…

We have no shortage of advice telling us to let go. Let go of the past. Let go of what we can’t control. Let go of our adult children’s choices, our ex-husbands’ opinions, the roles we’ve outgrown, the expectations we’ve been carrying since before…